4 ms·

Many people here claim “it's a $5 box, what do you expect”. First it may be a $10 or a $20 box. But more importantly, every VPS provider of the few I've tried

Many people here claim “it's a $5 box, what do you expect”. First it may be a $10 or a $20 box. But more importantly, every VPS provider of the few I've tried my self (e.g. Linode, XenCon), sends an email and opens a support ticket every time a $10 VPS goes off. So please, do not try to change the norm. A server is a server no matter the cost and should be reliable. I like digital ocean but they won't get better by petting them.

aroch 13y ago
Neither Leaseweb or OVH send me emails when my $1000's in Server/VPS/Compute appliances go down unless I sign up for a paid SLA (I do). Rackspace sometimes emails me about downtime, but usually only after the fact to let me know I'm getting $40 back. Amazon doesn't really let me know either, their status board remains in the green barring natural disaster or the AWS region literally catching on fire. Unless you're paying for an SLA which defines uptime and notification time, you're at the beck and call of Best Effort support, which may mean no notification and no reimbursement for downtime. Notification within minutes of your VPS going down isn't necessarily the norm.
- sirdogealot 13y ago
  OVH doesn't inform you because you're paying commodity pricing for unmanaged servers. It's actually your job to keep track of the downtime, not theirs. Digitalocean stands to make ~$10,000 monthly of of a "$1,000 server" because it is somewhat managed, and thus has the responsability of informing the 100 or 1,000 odd customers affected because of their mistake imho.
  - prebrov 13y ago
    Agree totally. Physical servers are fully managed by DO and they absolutely must inform customers when they fail at their job.
  - aroch 13y ago
    >> OVH doesn't inform you because you're paying commodity pricing for unmanaged servers Well no, I'm not paying commodity pricing (I'd hardly call a ~$6K server commodity) and OVH offers managed virtual rack services. >> Digitalocean stands to make ~$10,000 monthly of of a "$1,000 server" Err, what? You're vastly underestimating the cost of one of their nodes.
- Therac20 13y ago
  I received an email from OVH every time I managed to bork the [network | iptables | kernel | other stuff I should not mess with] so much that the server stopped being responsive. I always figured it was part of their default monitoring, I will check if I have subscribed to a paid option or not.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  I got an email when my $20/month linode box went down (collateral damage from a DDoS)...
- andmarios 13y ago
  It isn't about notification nor SLA. It is about making your customers feel at ease, giving your team less work and lowering your costs. If my VPS is down and my hosting provider do not aknowledge it, it is only logical that I will have myself to create a ticket. As a customer I get both anxious and lose time. On the provider's end, now they have an open ticket that they have to read, possibly connect with another employee than the one that provides 1st level support and give me a proper answer. An automated ticket that would probably be semi-automatically closed too is best for both of us. For notification purposes there are excellent services (uptimerobot, pingdom, monitor.us). SLA would be nice to have but most good lower cost VPS providers usually are over 99.9%, which is nice except the occasional outlier.
jamroom 13y ago
As a very long time Linode user (recently switched to DO for all my servers) I never received emails when my instance would go down (and being in the Fremont DC that happened quite a few times). Maybe that is new but it certainly has not been the norm.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Personal anecdote: I don't remember if Linode sends emails or not. Probably because uptime on one of my servers is currently 1390 days.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  I have had a single downtime, got an email and autocreated ticket. This was about a month ago so maybe it's relatively recent, or maybe it depends on the dc.

aroch 13y ago

Neither Leaseweb or OVH send me emails when my $1000's in Server/VPS/Compute appliances go down unless I sign up for a paid SLA (I do). Rackspace sometimes emails me about downtime, but usually only after the fact to let me know I'm getting $40 back. Amazon doesn't really let me know either, their status board remains in the green barring natural disaster or the AWS region literally catching on fire. Unless you're paying for an SLA which defines uptime and notification time, you're at the beck and call of Best Effort support, which may mean no notification and no reimbursement for downtime. Notification within minutes of your VPS going down isn't necessarily the norm.

sirdogealot 13y ago
OVH doesn't inform you because you're paying commodity pricing for unmanaged servers. It's actually your job to keep track of the downtime, not theirs. Digitalocean stands to make ~$10,000 monthly of of a "$1,000 server" because it is somewhat managed, and thus has the responsability of informing the 100 or 1,000 odd customers affected because of their mistake imho.
- prebrov 13y ago
  Agree totally. Physical servers are fully managed by DO and they absolutely must inform customers when they fail at their job.
- aroch 13y ago
  >> OVH doesn't inform you because you're paying commodity pricing for unmanaged servers Well no, I'm not paying commodity pricing (I'd hardly call a ~$6K server commodity) and OVH offers managed virtual rack services. >> Digitalocean stands to make ~$10,000 monthly of of a "$1,000 server" Err, what? You're vastly underestimating the cost of one of their nodes.
Therac20 13y ago
I received an email from OVH every time I managed to bork the [network | iptables | kernel | other stuff I should not mess with] so much that the server stopped being responsive. I always figured it was part of their default monitoring, I will check if I have subscribed to a paid option or not.
blueskin_ 13y ago
I got an email when my $20/month linode box went down (collateral damage from a DDoS)...
andmarios 13y ago
It isn't about notification nor SLA. It is about making your customers feel at ease, giving your team less work and lowering your costs. If my VPS is down and my hosting provider do not aknowledge it, it is only logical that I will have myself to create a ticket. As a customer I get both anxious and lose time. On the provider's end, now they have an open ticket that they have to read, possibly connect with another employee than the one that provides 1st level support and give me a proper answer. An automated ticket that would probably be semi-automatically closed too is best for both of us. For notification purposes there are excellent services (uptimerobot, pingdom, monitor.us). SLA would be nice to have but most good lower cost VPS providers usually are over 99.9%, which is nice except the occasional outlier.

jamroom 13y ago

As a very long time Linode user (recently switched to DO for all my servers) I never received emails when my instance would go down (and being in the Fremont DC that happened quite a few times). Maybe that is new but it certainly has not been the norm.

rimantas 13y ago
Personal anecdote: I don't remember if Linode sends emails or not. Probably because uptime on one of my servers is currently 1390 days.
blueskin_ 13y ago
I have had a single downtime, got an email and autocreated ticket. This was about a month ago so maybe it's relatively recent, or maybe it depends on the dc.